When genre-blending singer, songwriter, and producer Jacob Collier began work on his Djesse album in 2018, he planned to finish it in a year. But it didn’t work out that way.

With the release of “Djesse Vol. 4” last month, the English artist has finally wrapped up a six-year project that kept expanding. The new 16-track volume offers yet another roller coaster of musical experiences as Collier fuses unique sounds with more recognizable arrangements, seizing attention with bold moves while drifting in and out of more familiar, but no less masterfully navigated, sonic spaces.

“I’ve just been so ignited by the process of learning for so many years,” Collier said in a virtual press conference last month hosted by junior Ally Hall, a public relations representative for Universal Music Group’s creative solutions team 1824. “The best way that I’ve found to learn is to collaborate. Djesse at its heart is a monumental collaborative escapade.”

This album follows this roadmap to the letter, using the musical abilities of other artists to help express Collier’s creative vision. 

The high-energy funk talents of Lawrence and the old soulful voice of Michael McDonald build an instant earworm in “Wherever I Go,” while the vocal talents of Shawn Mendes and Kirk Franklin craft a heartwarming gospel-style song about coming together during difficulty in “Witness Me.”

But while it is teamwork as usual on “Djesse Vol. 4,” the new release marks itself off from the other volumes with a new kind of collaboration Collier said he didn’t see coming.

There are 100,000 voices on the album — not just the voices of Grammy-winning musicians but those of audience members all over the world, which Collier used to build a massive choral ensemble and tap into the “hive mind” he said he thinks humankind has when it comes to music.

“I tend to give each segment of the audience a starting note and then I’ll point up or down to each segment at a time and then those notes will rise or fall accordingly,” Collier said. “But I don’t tell people what to do, they just know already.”

This instinctive ability of all people to engage with music at some level pushes back on the idea that the technical expertise in Collier’s music makes it inaccessible to his more casual listeners.

“I tend to find that audiences actually really appreciate not being bent to,” Collier said. “I think the best thing I can do is make things I really respond to with awareness of the audience and sometimes using the audience.”

Collier said he takes a similar approach when working with the musicians he features in his discography, finding that it creates more space for others to feel confident when he doesn’t shrink his ambitions. 

“My job as a collaborator is to essentially scale my universe to be compatible with somebody else’s, but without reducing it in scale,” Collier said to The Collegian.   

This approach gives birth to unforgettable moments, like the one fans got to witness in a Feb. 23 social media post capturing the moment Collier sat down with Tori Kelly to record the vocals on his arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel. 

In the video, Collier shows Kelly the vocal runs he has planned for the track — runs so harmonically challenging and creative that she can only laugh, shake her head, and turn to the microphone to give it a try. She executes them flawlessly, performing vocal acrobatics that masses of singers have now taken to the internet in an attempt to replicate over the last several weeks. 

This open community of people with a shared passion for music turned out to be a theme for this particular piece of the project.

“The big dream with Djesse was for each volume to inhabit a different sonic universe,” Collier said. “‘Djesse Vol. 1’ was an orchestral album, ‘Djesse Vol. 2’ was more of an acoustic album, ‘Djesse Vol. 3’ was a kind of digital, electronic album, and ‘Djesse Vol. 4’ I kind of deliberately left blank for the end and it’s ended up being an album very much in celebration of humankind.”

The album ends quite literally on a goodbye in “World O World” as Collier bids farewell with an epic arrangement of choral harmonies, putting a bow on a project that occupied over a half-decade of his life.

“I thought that by the end of “Djesse Vol. 4” I would be ready to start my career,” Collier said. “That was the sort of overarching thing for me was like, ‘When I’ve done Djesse then I’ll be ready, I can really contribute something of value in all these different things I enjoy. So I would officially say I’m ready to start my career in a sense now.’”

It’s safe to say that if Collier is only getting started, we’d better watch out for what he is planning next.